Rift Zone

(Paperback)

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RIFT ZONE, Taylor's much-anticipated third book traces literal and metaphoric fault lines--rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Taylor's hometown--an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault--these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment.

Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic violence against our world's current unsteadinesses--mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink--an American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious--a fearsome tremor of a book.

Reviews

The poet for our moment.Ilya Kaminsky, author ofDeaf Republic

InRift Zone, Tess Taylors brilliant fourth collection, we encounter a magisterial range of subjects, from the geologic to the civic to the intimately personal. This book is a confident poetic engagement with the vital issues of our time, including the disastrous consequences of human activity on our climate, and its effect on the public and private spheres. Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is anecessary addition to the corpus of work dedicated to grieving the world as we know it.Ada Limn, author ofThe Carrying

"Reading Tess Taylors book as one sequence, which I highly recommend, is like taking a long walk with a vivid friend. Her voice falls in a steady rain of memory and witness, calling an entire landscape to life. Unearthing and sifting the seismic layers of her ownEast Bay locale, shes created a haunting American elegy."Jonathan Lethem, author ofThe Feral Detective

Part natural history, part social history, part personal history, part prayer, the poems inRift Zoneare lit by a Northern Californian light that will both soothe and sear our hearts.Camille T. Dungy, author ofTrophic Cascade

Taylor has an eye for hidden histories, and the way unreconciled violences of the past continue to shape our collective and individual consciousness.JinJin Xu,Los Angeles Review of Books

In this volume of poetry, youll find a wide range of emotion, deep sensitivity, and strong reactions. In a way she speaks for those of us who speak out but are seldom heard, who dont know what to say, or are crowded out by louder, more forceful voices.Tammy Ruggles,Reader Views

"Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic violence against our world's current unsteadinesses--mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink--an American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious--a fearsome tremor of a book."Point Reyes Books

Author Bio

The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Tess Taylors first book, The Forage House, as stunning. Critic Stephanie Burt called Work & Days, her second book, our moments Georgic, and it was named one of the ten best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Taylors poetry and nonfiction appear widely; she chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle and is the on-air poetry reviewer for NPRs All Things Considered. She was a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Anne Spencer Writer in Residence at Randolph College. Taylor grew up and lives in El Cerrito, California.